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39873.572216
Unlike its moral and intellectual counterparts, the virtue of aesthetic humility has been widely neglected. In order to begin filling in this gap, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics is a promising resource for developing a model of aesthetic humility. Initially, however, this may seem like an unpromising starting point as Kant’s aesthetics might appear to promote aesthetic arrogance instead. In spite of this prima facie worry, I claim that Kant’s aesthetics provides an illuminating model of aesthetic humility that sheds light not only on the self- and other-directed attitudes it involves, but also on how aesthetic humility can serve as a corrective to the vices of aesthetic arrogance and aesthetic servility. In addition to revealing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics prizes humility rather than arrogance, I aim to show that the Kantian model of aesthetic humility can enrich our understanding of humility more generally and contribute to the on-going effort in aesthetics to analyze specific aesthetic virtues and vices.
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39905.572425
In this post, I explore how analogical modes of explanation have been used in empirical psychology to loop together data derived through experiments and descriptive explanation. Metaphor has been used to transcend the limitations of experiments on human subjects because it allows for framing higher-level interpretation of data through notions of purpose, constraints, and goals. …
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106764.572466
In an alternative history of the world, perhaps quantum mechanics could have been discovered by chemists following up on the theories of two mathematicians from the late 1800s: Sylvester, and Gordan. Both are famous for their work on invariant theory, which we would now call part of group representation theory. …
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181849.572485
In A Suspicious Science, I analyze the epistemic context of the uses of psychology in contemporary society so as to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-level human science. I distinguish three uses of psychology: positivist-pragmatic empirical study, discursive therapeutic approaches which promote expressive individualism, and reflexive creative practices employed in the arts and the humanities. …
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207794.572502
Noam Chomsky is justly famous for his revolutionary contributions to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. He is presently in his 92nd year, and we thought it high time to provide an overview of the major achievements of his now more than sixty-year-old research program and its prospects for the future. This is particularly pressing in the light of persistent rumors, encouraged by a number of authors , that his program has proven bankrupt, “completely wrong” and has been replaced by various sorts of proposals in general statistical learning and “functionalist/constructionist” linguistic theories (which we return to below).
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236345.572519
Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir have offered a new answer, suggesting that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap--neither true nor false. I argue that their solution is susceptible to a revenge paradox, concerning whether God has the power to render the sentence non-gappy. More exactly, the revenge paradox concerns whether God has the power to realize the attribute "having the power to create an unliftable stone or not." Assuming a being with all powers can realize that "dilemma attribute," then in brief, it still follows that there is some possible task which God cannot perform. In reply, B&C might suggest that the revenge paradox merely shows another truth-value gap--effectively, God neither has nor lacks the power to realize the dilemma attribute. But since I have the power to realize the attribute, God must as well. Beall & Cotnoir might respond that God does not have such a power since, per Aquinas, some powers are contrary to God’s nature. Yet such an Aquinian suggestion is sufficient to block the original paradox, in which case, there is little motivation to proffer truth-value gaps in addition. I conclude that Beall & Cotnoir do not provide a well-motivated solution to the paradox.
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236364.572533
The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social—their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, that they are doing something together, which they understand as a cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone.
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236385.572547
Hanna. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
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236425.572567
There is a divide in the panpsychist research community, perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the split in the original psychoanalytic movement between Jungians and Freudians. There are those, such as David Chalmers, Angela Mendelovici, and Luke Roelofs, Itay Shani, and myself, who do have certain convictions which may be called ‘spiritual,’ or at least which depart more radically from our standard naturalistic picture of reality than bog-standard panpsychism. I have just finished a book arguing that the universe has a purpose, for example.
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236430.572584
The creation of the atomic bomb is one of the most famous and well-studied examples of developing a transformative technology — one that changes the shape of human affairs. Teams of scientists and engineers in many different countries knew in advance that the technology may have tremendous implications for the world and strived to turn the idea into reality. The history of their projects provides many insights that may be useful as scientists and engineers today strive to develop new transformative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, or nanotechnology.
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236489.572601
Despite the lower levels of psychopathy in women than in men, the scientific interest in studying psychopathy in female participants is increasing. Nevertheless, the number of studies investigating psychopathy in women and associated phenomena remains low. The influence of psychopathy in women inmates on experimental tasks of emotional recognition and moral judgment was evaluated, aiming to contribute to this field of research. Utilitarian moral judgment was predicted by psychopathy, specifically by primary and secondary psychopathy, while primary psychopathy predicted a worse performance on the emotional recognition task. There was no significant influence of general intellectual abilities on either task. Contrarily to what was expected, emotional recognition did not prove to be a significant mediator of the relationship between psychopathy and utilitarian moral judgment. These results emphasize that the tendency to utilitarian moral judgment and worse recognition of facial expressions of emotion are associated to higher psychopathy scores in female inmates (especially primary psychopathy), but more studies are necessary to address the role of the emotional component in the process of moral judgment.
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279841.572616
In the last few decades, the literature on moral responsibility has been increasingly populated by scientific studies. Studies in neuroscience and psychology, in particular, have been claimed to be relevant for discussions about moral responsibility in a number of ways.
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281515.572642
I discuss first the various meanings of naturalism in philosophy and then in ethics: that of American Naturalism, that of Dewey’s pragmatism, the sense of negation of Moore’s negation of naturalism, the neo-Aristotelian, and that of external realists. I will argue a fundamental heterogeneity of these meanings and add that the reasons for the apparent unity of a naturalist front in recent philosophical debates depend more on factors studied by the sociology of knowledge than philosophical reasons. I suggest one plausible naturalism, Aristotle’s and Dewey’s claim that moral good is not specifically moral. Finally, I add that scientific exploration programs into the biological bases of behaviour and coordination of behaviour within groups are promising but hardly ‘naturalistic’ and compatible with ethical intuitionism or Kantian ethics.
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327480.572683
The term “solidarity” first becomes prevalent in the
early- to late-nineteenth century in France. Since then, it has always
been used to describe a special relationship of unity and mutual
indebtedness within a group. The term’s origins lie in French
legal usage, in which the Roman legal concept of an obligation in
solidum—a joint contractual obligation in which each
signatory declared himself liable for the debts of all
together—long had a place in the French code civile
(Blais 2007; Hayward 1959; Wildt 1999). Solidarity expands beyond its
legal origins to become a central social and political concept in
response to anxiety about the centrifugal, individualizing forces of
commercial and industrial society.
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442014.572721
« Of course Grover’s algorithm offers a quantum advantage! Xavier Waintal responds (tl;dr Grover is still quadratically faster)
This morning Xavier Waintal, coauthor of the new arXiv preprint “””refuting””” Grover’s algorithm, which I dismantled here yesterday, emailed me a two-paragraph response. …
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573640.573086
This chapter takes a closer look at the doctrine of common notions and universal consent developed by Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51) in his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, a work based on lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1645–46, but only published posthumously in 1652, followed by three additional editions in 1654, 1661, and 1669.
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573647.573182
Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situation in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (i) people manifest a considerable willingness to hold autonomous systems morally responsible, (ii) partially exculpate human agents when interacting with such systems, and that more generally (iii) the possibility of normative responsibility gaps is indeed at odds with people’s pronounced retributivist inclinations. We discuss what these results mean for potential implications of the retribution gap and other positions in the responsibility gap literature.
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573705.573213
We reevaluate the status of the gauge principle and reposition it as an intermediary structure dependent on the initial conditions we endow on our theory. We explore how the gauge symmetry manifests in the context of basic quantum electrodynamics, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the modern scattering amplitudes program. We also investigate the addition of an auxiliary field in φ theory and see how the dynamics are altered. Modal language is pointed to and utilized as a convenient way to articulate the weight gauge symmetry demands in our theories as well as the principles of locality and Lorentz invariance. A shifting scale ontology is introduced with regards to the gauge principle and other structures of Quantum Field Theory in general.
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575717.573238
« On overexcitable children
Of course Grover’s algorithm offers a quantum advantage! I was really, really hoping that I’d be able to avoid blogging about this new arXiv preprint, by E. M. Stoudenmire and Xavier Waintal:
Grover’s Algorithm Offers No Quantum Advantage
Grover’s algorithm is one of the primary algorithms offered as evidence that quantum computers can provide an advantage over classical computers. …
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799697.573295
Both (Gruber, Block, & Montemayor, 2022) and (Buonomano & Rovelli, 2021) contain interesting interdisciplinary proposals for how to think about the relation between humans’ experience of time and what time is like. This is a complex topic. Tackling it requires confronting difficult questions about (i) which features of experience and which features of time are difficult to fit together (if any), (ii) which discipline(s) should attempt the required explanation(s) (if any are required), and (iii) what these explanation(s) might look like. I’m very sympathetic to aspects of each proposal. In what follows, I offer some comments, starting with (Buonomano & Rovelli, 2021). At the outset, Buonomano and Rovelli (hereafter B&R) distinguish three reasons why “the theoretical physicist is led to reject the idea that the commonsense view of time could remain valid outside a limited domain”. The first concerns the time reversal invariance of elementary mechanical laws, the second relativity’s conflict with the notion of a global present, and the third the absence of a time variable in the basic equations of many theories of quantum gravity. They set aside the third as it pertains to the evolving frontiers of physics and concentrate on the first two, which pertain to well established theories.
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835153.573358
Over the past three years, the COVID pandemic has highlighted two, prima facie opposite, stances on science. On the one hand, scientists have attracted headlines and public attention as never before using models and model-based evidence to make projections about the course of the pandemic and to inform policy recommendations about when to close or re-open schools, restaurants, and venues. We witnessed politicians and governments around the world promising to “follow the science” in public health measures. On the other hand, the pandemic also shone a light on widespread resistance to science among large swathes of the public—diverse groups of people expressing hesitancy to getting vaccinated and reluctance complying with public health measures based on epidemiological models, with questions such as “Why trust model-based projections?”; “Why trust new vaccines?”; and more concerning, “Why trust the experts?” Notwithstanding the—jarring—dissimilarity, these two stances are related. To declare, as some politicians and governments around the world have done, to “follow the science” has sometimes been a powerful preventative measure against public discontent with restrictive lockdown measures. On occasion, “follow the science” has also been a convenient way of discarding political responsibilities and tacitly passing the epistemic buck to scientists and their projections, models, and public health recommendations. Likewise, vaccine hesitancy and wider resistance to comply with public health recommendations have often been another way of indirectly blaming the scientists for coming up with solutions to problems that the public was unwilling to follow.
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835189.573393
Francisco Ayala and others have argued that recent genetic evidence shows that the origins of the human race cannot be monogenetic, as the Church has traditionally taught. This paper replies to that objection, developing a distinction between biological and theological species first proposed by Andrew Alexander in 1964.
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835191.57342
Good Morning everyone. Good Morning, Holy Father. It was a very intense journey, even demanding — certainly for the journalists and also for you —; a beautiful trip, with many great events and many things to say, many discourses. And now there is this moment of encounter with the press. If you wish to say something, perhaps, at the start ...
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835194.573451
The question of divine freedom has from the beginning been at the center of the encounter between Greek philosophy and Biblical faith. The Bible speaks frequently of the divine will (thelēma), both in the sense of determinate purpose or counsel (as in “thy will be done” of the Lord’s Prayer) and in the sense of an act of willing (as in the statement that God created the world by His will, Rev. 4:11). Yet, important though they are, these facts alone are not decisive for an understanding of divine freedom. Philosophers from Plotinus to the present have frequently attributed both will and freedom to God, meaning by these assertions only that God is absolutely unconstrained and so acts fully in accordance with His own nature. The critical question for understanding what is distinctive about the Biblical tradition is whether the divine will, as understood there, means no more than this—i.e., the perfect and unimpeded expression of the divine nature—or also includes an element of spontaneous and indeterminate choice.
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915051.573479
Relative motion of particles is examined in the context of relational space-time. It is shown that de Broglie waves may be derived as a representation of the coordinate maps between the rest-frames of these particles. Energy and momentum are not absolute characteristics of these particles, they are understood as parameters of the coordinate maps between their rest-frames. It is also demonstrated the position of a particle is not an absolute, it is contingent on the frame of reference used to observe the particle.
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998800.573504
There is a PDF of this post here.Take a quantity whose value you wish to estimate---the basic reproduction number for a virus; the number of jelly beans in a jar at the school fête; the global temperature rise caused by doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere; the number of years before humanity goes extinct. …
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1089865.573531
In this article, I consider Grouchy’s critique of economic inequality and her proposed solution to what she perceives as this grave social ill. On her view, economic inequality chips away at the bonds of accountability in society and prevents people from seeing one another as moral equals. As a step toward restoring these bonds between people, Grouchy argues that: first, we should expand property ownership, thereby giving each person a stake in the community; second, we should ensure access to education and redirect its aims, to provide people with the necessary tools to reason about the common good. In so doing, Grouchy claims, we can reawaken the sense of accountability that people have to one another in community.
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1251259.573555
Suppose I am playing Tetris seriously. What am I aiming at? It’s not victory: one cannot win Tetris. A good score, yes. But I wouldn’t stop playing after reaching a good
score. So a merely good score isn’t all I am aiming at. …
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1492061.573581
With special relativity, we seem to be facing a conundrum. It is a very well-tested theory; in this way, the Minkowski spacetime must be “capturing” essential features of space and time. However, its geometry seems to be incompatible with any sort of global notion of time. We might only have local notions of now (present moment) and time flow, at best. In this note, we will explore the possibility that a pretty much global notion of now (and time flow) might be hiding in plain sight in the geometry of the Minkowski spacetime.
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1492108.573611
Despite quantum theory’s remarkable success at predicting the statistical results of experiments, many philosophers worry that it nonetheless lacks some crucial connection between theory and experiment. Such worries constitute the Quantum Measurement Problems. One can broadly identify two kinds of worries: 1) pragmatic: it is unclear how to model our measurement processes in order to extract experimental predictions, and 2) realist: we lack a satisfying ontological account of measurement processes. While both issues deserve attention, the pragmatic worries have worse consequences if left unanswered: If our pragmatic theory-to-experiment linkage is unsatisfactory, then quantum theory is at risk of losing both its evidential support and its physical salience. Avoiding these risks is at the core of what I will call the Pragmatic Measurement Problem.